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presented by them, having already alluded to them in considerable detail (see 
Records of the Rocks, Geological Magazine, &c). But it will be interesting to 
some amongst you if I attempt to give some idea of the geological period, when the 
wild animals lived in the Forest of Dean. Those amongst you who are acquainted 
with the Records of Geology, will remember that during the ‘‘ Pliocene ages” of 
Tertiary geology, the length and breadth of Europe, in its southern districts, was 
the home of vast herds of rhinoceri, hippopotami, mastodons, elephants, tapirs, 
stags, beavers, and other animals, With these were various tigers, lions, and 
hyenas, and especially the great tiger (the Machairodus Cuthidens) with canine 
teeth like a sabre. During that period we know from fossil evidence of hundreds 
of extinct animals, that Europe and Africa were joined together by land, over 
which the quadrupeds roamed, and that land reached from continent to continent 
in several points, where now roll the waves of the Mediterranean sea. There are 
caves and fissures at Malta, Gibraltar, Sicily, and Italy crammed with the remains 
of African forms of leopards and hyenas, lynxes, and bears, associated with 
hippopotami, extinct elephants. and rhinoceri, which then roamed in thousands 
over land now submerged beneath the Mediterranean, and then stretching on 
to what is now Southern Europe. It was during the close of this pliocene period 
that an ancient forest land of Great Britain, now known as the Cromer Forest bed 
of Norfolk and Suffolk, was tenanted by three species of elephant, two rhinoceroses, 
hippopotami, a gigantic beaver, numerous stags, and large carnivora, but no arctic 
forms of mammalia such as reindeer or the woolly rhinoceros, or mammoth, or 
marmot, are found amongst them. But the climate, which in the pliocene ages 
was in Europe comparatively warm and temperate, was gradually changing and 
passing into the Arctic severity of the glacial period, and, as we now know, with 
the glacial period there ensued subsidences of land, which, in certain localities, 
was afterwards re-elevated, but again there are large areas of that once great 
continent which are now washed over by the salt sea waves. These subsidences 
of the glacial lands occasioned the submergence of immense tracts of land between 
Africa and Europe, and England and France, and Ireland and England, and large 
-areas of these ancient lands are now covered by the Atlantic and Mediterranean 
‘seas, land which was once the home of thousands of living animals. As the glacial 
period went on, the cold of the northern regions increased and this change caused 
a corresponding change in the animals which frequented the land. The Southern 
forms of elephants, rhinoceri, deer, and antelopes [retreated southwards with the 
accompanying carnivora, and are now represented by the African forms of animal 
life so well known to the zoologist and hunter, while.their places were taken by 
Arctic and sub-Artic animals such as the mammoth and-tichorhine rhinoceros, the 
reindeer and musk ox, Irish deer, bison, marmot, and others, thousands of which 
were frozen up in the bitter regions of the glacial north. So severe was this cold 
of the glacial epoch, where even now is the sunny south, that I have knocked out 
the teeth of the bison and woolly rhinoceros in rocks on which now grow the orange, 
the lemon, and the palm, and seen caves which contain the remains of the reindeer, 
where now the fire-fly flits by the Mediterranean shores. I have seen, too, the 
action of glaciers, the relics of which once swept down the vales where now the 
olive tree bears its fruit and the cork tree sends forth her branches. 
